Paul Otlet, a pioneer of information science is today best known as co-initiator of the Universal Decimal Classification system, still used in national libraries of several countries. Other strands of his work began to be investigated on a larger scale only in the 1990s. What is the relevance of his work in light of digital networks?

An image produced and distributed by Google to pay tribute to Paul Otlet in his 147 anniversary in the homepage of their search engine. The image and the blog post further integrate/fabricate to their corporate history a relation between Paul Otlet work and the services of Google, using "knowledge" and their Google Cultural institute as narrative thread.
https://www.google.com/doodles/mundaneum-co-founder-paul-otlets-147th-birthday

On the fly, it is suggestive to draw a straight line from Otlet's statement that "Once one read; today one refers to, checks through, skims", to the practice of full-⁠text search, so successfully branded by the Alphabet companies. But even a superficial browsing of his book, Traité de documentation, shows that such a shortcut can be misleading. Otlet suggests several novel forms of reading, writing (including a pen with integrated eraser!) and dissemination of knowledge, but the book itself is entirely committed to the intellectual work of selecting and indexing documents. By turning The 'book on the book' into a bag of words and submitting it to some crude form of text-⁠mining, I'd like to make a start with finding out what emerges between these two very different approaches of knowledge indexing, rather than insisting on how the one pre-⁠thinks the other.